History of The Internet - Three Terminals and An ARPA

Three Terminals and An ARPA

A fundamental pioneer in the call for a global network, J. C. R. Licklider, articulated the ideas in his January 1960 paper, Man-Computer Symbiosis.

"A network of such, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and symbiotic functions." —J.C.R. Licklider,

In August 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man Computer Communication", which was one of the first descriptions of a networked future.

In October 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as Director of the newly established Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within DARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network". As part of the information processing office's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Licklider's identified need for inter-networking would be made obvious by the apparent waste of resources this caused.

"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. I said, it's obvious what to do (But I don't want to do it): If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet." —Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as a Communications Device", in an interview with The New York Times,

Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that provided the impetus that led his successors such as Lawrence Roberts and Robert Taylor to further the ARPANET development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two years.